The truth about getting ahead in business

This is the first book I've read about a business icon where I can fully understand how they became successful. Most biographies gloss over details on how they made their first dollar and fail to reveal the true nature of their success. David Nasaw spares no expense in detailing Andrew Carnegie's early years of employment that resulted in his association with other future successful businessmen (where, in my opinion, he unabashedly road others' coattails). Through these contacts and "lucky" timing, Carnegie leveraged an uncanny ability to foresee future industry changes and forced his point of view upon the working class and business associates. All the while he cloak himself in the veil of future philanthropic endeavors to shield his questionable points of views and tactics.

an advocate for organized labor

This book is less about Carnegie than it is about the Homestead plant's labor unrest. And on this topic the author is an unabashed labor partisan. He unfailingly calls replacement workers "scabs", routinely uses inflamatory language like "... crumbs for the angry masses" or "pigheaded" to describe Carnegie and his partners.

The Richest Man In The World (And A Robber Baron)

Mr. Nasaw has written a long (over 800 pages of text) and lively account of the the opportunistic steel baron, Andrew Carnegie. There is nearly 100 pages of notes and two separate sections of B/W photos of Mr. Carnegie and his world. From the Civil War to the end of the century, the author shows that Mr. Carnegie had a knack for being in the right place at the right time and a genius for riding the next big wave of American modernization. Ethics eluded him and his fellow robber barons as they did whatever they wanted, even murdering strikers at the Homestead Works of Mr. Carnegie (who silently watched and did nothing to rein in the actions of his partner, Mr. Frick). He was the first large-scale philanthropist in giving away billions for the last half of his life. The Gilded Age is little understood today but this biography gives the reader a taste of that era. Another biography of that time is "The Dark Genius of Wall State" (2005) by Ed Renehan about the life of Jay Gould.